Runner
by SomeoneThatExists
Summary: [noun; a.) one that runs: racer; b.) messenger; c.) a person who delivers messages, reports, materials, or products either within a business or organization or to outside locations;] Because running is what she's good at. Though admittedly, choosing the direction to run in isn't something she usually bothers with. [OC story, don't like don't read!]
1. Chapter 1

**I need a life. Or not. But I need a hobby and maybe a sliver of inspiration for my other stories which I may or may not be updating anytime soon.**

 **Remember, T for language, OC story. Beware of the 'f' word.**

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 _ **Disclaimer: No, I don't own any transformers franchise. I only own this fic and my OC.**_

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1

...

I could never remember when I first thought something was... _off_.

It was gradual, like tiny flickering lights and déjà vu moments. It started small at first. Maybe a stray thought of, 'those buildings seem awfully tall today', or, 'it sounds like I'm walking through an industrial section or something'. Then the stray thoughts became actual observations, and actual observations turned into questions like, 'what am I doing here?' and most importantly, 'why are robots walking around?'.

Eventually, I started becoming much more...aware. I kept feeling like I didn't belong here because everything felt too weird and alien but the feeling disappeared eventually so I thought, it's probably just nothing.

Of course I eventually stopped denying when one day, I blinked at myself in the mirror and thought, _I am looking at a transformer_.

I took a few moments to process that before I saw my(mine, because who else would it belong to?) eyes—optics?—widen in disbelief.

Okay. What the fuck.

I slowly raised a hand—servo—and felt the warm shifting metal plates of my face and all I could do was suck in a surprised breath—vent—when I felt the claws poking at my cheek.

Then, "Okay what the fuck."

I paused. Blinked at my reflection.

...Nope, still there.

I turned my helm to the right, took a deep vent— _breath_ —turned back aaaand...

"Oh my god."

I shut down. Figuratively of course.

Right. Okay. Transformer in the mirror, right.

Priorities, self, remember priorities.

I saw my new shiny, gleaming metal face scrunch up its, er, I mean her— _my_ face in something that looked like a cross between distress and incredulity. Right then and there, everything running through my head seemed to be summed up with a single sentence:

"Of _fucking_ course I get turned into one of my dad's favorite toys."

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I remember everything before I became a...robot.

No wait, that sounds wrong. _Transformer_ , then.

I was doing a delivery for a friend's acquaintance. He wanted me to run through the city to bring some sort of package at a meet-up place. I didn't ask for more information and he didn't offer. It wasn't part of the job to ask questions anyway. He just wanted me to be there on time.

And yes, I did specifically say 'run'. Freerunning to be exact, parkour if you want to be fancy.

Me and my brothers and friends had this sort of unofficial organization that do runs, deliveries, for people in exchange for something. Outsiders hire us with money. Customers familiar with us offer favors in return. Some offer some old things that could be worth something. There even one time someone ordered pizza for us in exchange for delivering a couple of bags to the other end of the city.

I didn't start our little mini business. It was actually my brothers and their friends. On a whim, they took up a parkour class when they were on a trip out of town and continued practicing when they got back home. Since they couldn't exactly go out of town for a single parkour class, they decided to work on it themselves at home.

There was a lot of accidents. A couple hundred sprains, an endless number of scrapes, bruises and stretched muscles with an occasional broken or fractured bone thrown in. Dad wasn't sure what to think of his two sons' hobby and I wasn't entirely sure if he approved or not. Ma worried herself to death but she didn't want to stop her sons from doing something they obviously enjoyed so she just bought lots and lots of medical stuff, limited their time outside and heaped tons of warnings everytime they went out. I also learned first aid pretty quickly.

When more and more of my brothers' friends grew interested in parkour, my Ma contacted their previous teacher and asked if he could send someone who knew what they were doing to supervise. The teacher's sister, Amy, came over a week after, which was honestly good timing, because parkour was becoming the hit new _thing_ in school. Her presence became something of a semi-permanent arrangement. She had to go back of course, but every few months or so, she would stay in the neighborhood to check her students' progress.

Being the baby of the family, I often followed my brothers around when they practiced in the neighborhood. I was just watching at first, utterly terrified of the vaults and jumps from high places but I soon stopped watching in fear and started being more amazed. Everytime my brothers went out and started jogging to their meeting place with friends, I almost always tagged along. The three of us jogged towards there, something of a warm-up for them and exercise for me. The runs got faster eventually as we grew and developed. Soon, my brothers were having go through light exercises with them and their friends. It wasn't long before I was also leaping and vaulting my way through the neighborhood.

It carried on when we were all grown up and working respectable jobs. Amy made the unofficial delivery organization a somewhat legit thing (I mean, we still couldn't decide on a name). Her new and some old students did the deliveries as training. We, me and my brothers, did deliveries with the new kids in the class when we were free and not so tired from work.

The last thing I remembered from _before_ was the run for a friend's acquaintance. It was Amy who'd passed me the job, when one of the kids assigned that day was sick. I stuck in as a substitute for that day, I remembered that clearly.

I was winding my way through town and easily arrived at the meeting place, some open alley beside a local bookstore. It wasn't one of those creepy dark alleyways, thank god, considering that it was morning and it was only a short walk from one end of the alley to the other.

I only blinked at the empty alley before making my way to the corner and leaning on the brick wall of the bookstore. I mostly just fiddled with the straps of the backpack I was told to deliver as I waited on the corner. I did a cursory scan of my surroundings, noticing that there wasn't really many people out today. Considering that it was a weekday and the sun was really high up, I suppose it made sense that there wasn't a lot of people.

In the end, I just sighed to myself and settled on waiting.

"Hey kid!" I heard someone call out at the other end of the alley when something like ten minutes had passed. I turned my head slowly and blinked at the sunglasses guy in a fashionable (if impractical for the weather) leather jacket jogging towards me.

"You seen a young man go through here, with a bag or something? He'd probably look like he's in high school or something." He said quickly, glancing back behind him as if waiting for someone to round the corner and kill him. Okay, maybe not kill him, but there was definitely something paranoid in the way he moved and scanned his surroundings.

I blinked at him again slowly and deliberately before I straightened from my leaning on the wall. "I guess you'd be the guy I'm delivering this to?" I jabbed a thumb at the backpack I was leaning on and was, coincidentally, hiding from plain sight.

Something about the furrow of his brows made him look confused and incredibly suspicious. "Jax sent you? I thought he said it would be one of Amy's kids who'd do the run."

I shrugged. "The kid assigned today was sick. I subbed in for him." And technically, I _was_ one of Amy's kids. Still am, in a way.

He seemed to deeply contemplate on something before he roughly grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the middle of the alley. "Look, I was also supposed to give something to the kid," he babbled rather quickly. "Since the kid won't be here, can you just pass it along to him? I don't have any time left."

He kind of fidgeted in place and was quick to grab the bag out of my hands the moment it was off my shoulders. He slung the thing over his shoulder and fished a card out of his jacket's inner pocket. I took it curiously and looked it over. It was a tiny white business card that was completely, utterly blank.

I looked at it confusedly and looked up just in time before the man grabbed something from somewhere, then suddenly everything went dark.

* * *

It took a few more days of wandering aimlessly, trying to recall things from _before_ and staring blankly at my apartment's wall before I really realized that I really, really, _really_ was in Cybertron. It took me a datapad falling on my helm and nearly conking out from the pain to realize that nope, nuh-uh, pain's too real to be a dream.

And then it was _, who the fuck threw that datapad_.

I grabbed my dented helm as I sat up and glared at the cracked and broken screen of the thing before I tried looking around to find the culprit. I didn't look far though I certainly seemed to be looking in the wrong direction. Left, right, back, front—nothing. So I looked up.

The mech in the open window of the second story building looked far more traumatized than I did. He had his servo still reaching out in a futile attempt to catch a datapad that already landed on somebot's helm. His bright purple optics were opened wide and bright and then he was cringing back and out of view before I could yell at him.

I huffed and looked around not-so-discreetly, seeing the rest of the passers-by—well, pass by. They did glance and send curious looks to me and the broken datapad but did nothing else, continuing on, uncaring. Well, fuck them too, heart—er, sparkless idiots.

That was another thing I found odd: I suddenly had the knowledge of things I shouldn't know and I was translating human terms quicker than I notice in myself. It was _weird_. Feels so wrong and right at the same time.

Or maybe its the dented helm talking. Probably, yeah.

"Oh Primus I am so sorry!" My optics jerked up to the owner of the shriek who was barrelling through a group of bystanders who just happened to have the bad luck of standing in front of the doors. He flailed 'sorry' left and right to the bots he disturbed and despite the fact that he threw (intentionally or unintentionally) a datapad at my helm, I found him incredibly...entertaining.

"I am so sorry!" Was the first thing he said when he finally reached me, an energon blush staining his cheeks. He was quick to offer a servo to help me up. I took it gratefully.

"I honestly didn't think my younger brother would do something like that." He started explaining despite me not asking for it. "I just looked away for a quick while and suddenly he was hiding under my desk crying and saying he killed a black and silver femme on the sidewalk."

I looked him over carefully. He was a head taller than me which wasn't really much since everyone towered over me (I was really ridiculously small though my legs seemed disproportionately longer than the rest of my body) and he was colored lavender and some subtle mint green highlights. He had the build of a lighter frame and I noted the boosters on the back of his legs. He seemed to be genuinely horrified with what happened to my poor helm.

"Look, um—I know a medic that can help. I'll pay for the charges to get you fixed up, it's the least I could do to make it up to you." He offered hesitantly after an awkward silence.

I realized then that I had not even spoken a single word to this stranger. "...Right. I am—" I scrounged up a name from somewhere. "Arc—rail. Um, Arcrail. You can call me Arc for short."

His mouth plates curled up into something resembling a smile and his energy field (which I just acknowledged now) flickered from tense to eager. He cheerfully grabbed my servo which wasn't cradling my dent and gently pulled me along somewhere.

"Right! So I'll call you Arc, and you can call me Mint, which is short for Peppermint. Not really a designation for a mech, I know, but I really like it and it really fits my color scheme right? Right! Not a lot of mechs and femmes take my name at face value, yeah? Most of the time they think I'm joking when I introduce myself and—" I wasn't sure how to react to the sudden barrage of words pouring out of his vocalizer but I did realize something. I realized what he was.

I stopped him and deliberately placed a servo on his shoulder. He stopped and faced me, looking at me with all the innocence and purity in the world.

Of course, the fluffy sweet look was very recognizable. "You are a cream puff." I declared to him with all the seriousness I could muster.

He blinked, wide-opticed. "Eh?"

"A cream puff."

"Um, I—I don't know what a c—cream puff is?" The English word curled strangely around his glossa and I realized that there was no Cybertronian translation for cream puff.

I shook him slightly. "You are still a cream puff. Okay?"

"...Ah, um. Okay. I'll be your...cream puff." Poor little puff looked horribly confused so I just made him face front and started pushing him along. "Lead me to the medic." I kind of demanded but I didn't have time to feel guilty today. I had more important things to worry over, like the dent on my helm.

Cream puff brightened and continued with his chatter as if nothing had happened.

If there was such a thing as cream puff in this world, maybe it won't be so bad. And I'll need to find out what happened to me anyways.

But first, the dent in my helm, which may or may not be already affecting my thought processes. Priorities, you know.

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 **I feel like it ended on a weird but satisfying note. For reference, I'm leaning more on pronouncing Arcrail as Arc-rail, not Ar-crail. Might be full of OCs the first couple chapters but canon characters will definitely make an appearance in the future. PS: this is pre-war Cybertron.**


	2. Chapter 2

**If any of you guys know parkour/freerunning, I'd love to get suggestions and tips on how a traceur (is that really what people call parkour masters or something?) moves.**

 **PS: I will be making mention of a caste system in future chapters. I'm crediting that idea to** _SavvyEnigma_ **which she mentioned in her amazing fic** _Antebellum_ **. Recommended read if you watched the movie and is all about amazing plot and Cybertron-related things. Just thought I'd add that in early because why not.**

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 _ **Disclaimer: I don't own Transformers. I only own this fic and its OCs.**_

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2

...

When I looked back at my thought processes before I got my helm fixed, I realized that I sounded...of unsound mind.

"What." Was all I could say when Mint cheerfully told me about the fixed dent in my helm and what I had called him. Because I magically forgot everything that happened that early cycle, which was...problematic.

According to Clamp, the medic, "Normally dents like that wouldn't have a negative effect," he droned somewhat lethargically, "But the impact rattled your processor just a bit and it was enough to make you forget a few memory files of your sparklinghood. It's no big deal." Then he waved it off as if _amnesia_ _wasn't a big problem_.

I shifted on my seat at the edge of the medical berth and stared at him. "...Maybe you're the one who got hit in the helm."

Mint laughed—giggled, actually—and just sent me a half-apologetic half-relieved smile. "I'm sorry, this was my fault. You have backups right? Usually all it takes to solve things like these is to do a defrag."

Clamp sleepily waved a servo to Mint. "What he said. Though I'd prefer if you did it here just so I can check if everything's running smooth after."

I stared at both of them. It made sense, kind of. Transformers were just giant supercomputers with a soul so it makes sense that they have a back-up feature in their brains—processors. "Wouldn't the amount of memories fill up too much space in the processor though?" I wondered out loud.

"Fill up too much space?" Mint parroted me and looked at Clamp with a befuddled expression. Clamp, in turn, sent me a puzzled look as if trying to make sense of my words.

Oh wait, did I say something wrong?

"Generally, important or major memories always leave imprints in your spark." Clamp tilts his helm thoughtfully. "So usually, when bots lose their processor's copies of their memories, they just do a defrag which includes recreating memories from the imprints. Spark memories don't get wiped out unless it experiences trauma or fracture." He leans back into his chair in a languid manner. "I'm not too sure what you mean about filling up too much space though."

Crap, okay, so it's actually the spark who keeps the memories. Never mind. "Oh no, it's nothing, its just a thought." I tried waving it off. "I was, uh, thinking about if you backed it up on an...external storage of some kind."

They both made an 'Ah-okay-so-that's-what-she's-saying' kind of face. "We don't usually do that because of the sheer size of the memories and how long it usually takes to transfer to storage." Mint affirmed and Clamp adds, "And those kind of things are usually only done as a precaution when performing a spark transfer surgery, in case of complications."

Wow. So like, Transformer bodies are actually fascinating and kind of amazing. Still had questions though. "Sooo, why do you still have to do a defrag then, if you already have the memory in the spark?" Mint also looked curious, but not at the question. He stared at me as if trying to puzzle out something.

"Accessing a spark memory is difficult and requires training." Clamp starts, regardless of Mint's curious stare. "Our spark is still something we don't fully understand, despite the vorns of study conducted with it. It's one of those things that when you don't really question but accept it as it is because it _just is_." The white and blue medic waves his servos for emphasis. "Accessing anything in the spark means you have to delve into your...spirit, or your essence, which is the closest I can describe it. But oftentimes, if you don't know what you're doing and you just go do it, you become lost, I think is the term. Defragging is a natural process that helps strengthen the connection of your spark and processor by consolidating fragmented parts of your processor."

Deep words. Deep words everywhere. I need an in-built dictionary.

"I've heard about that 'lost' occurrence but never actually got an in-depth explanation of how it happens." Mint piped in, looking to Clamp curiously. "I suppose that's why it needs a lot of discipline and training?" I just noticed but Mint was actually sitting down on the swivel chair opposite Clamp, with a table stacked with datapads between them.

"That's just the mental preparation." Clamp disclosed, nodding knowingly. "You'd also need to go on a journey of self-affirmation, to find yourself and your balance." Clamp suddenly sounded so deep and profound, I had a hard time connecting him to the sleepy, lethargic lazy bot I thought he was. Mint was nodding sagely opposite him and I had the brief thought that they were like two wise old mechs discussing philosophy.

A medic that seemed to suffer from permanent sleepiness and ditzy mech so cheerfully oblivious. As old mechs.

How frightening.

"Right—we'd lost track of what we're supposed to be doing." Clamp announces and I thank him silently for putting us back on track. "I'd rather you do the defrag here in my clinic for the whole lunar cycle just so I can monitor your progress." Clamp instructed, standing up and moving a few datapads away from his desk. The leaning tower of datapads near the edge swayed dangerously when he accidentally bumped the underside of the table.

That thing is gonna a be a disaster. Seriously.

"I'll come visit maybe next mega-cycle." Mint jumps up and hugs me in a friendly manner. Because we may or may not be friends. Or he may think we are. But I don't. In a few hundred vorns maybe. "It was really nice meeting you and making a new friend Arc." Then he shoots me a radiant grin that burns the shell off my black dark goth spark. Yes, he was just _that_ lively. It was more than refreshing, it was getting dunked in rainbows, sparkles and unicorn pee and then getting air dried under a blazing golden sun.

Clamp shoos Mint off, who waves an enthusiastic goodbye before disappearing out the doors. Then he turns to me—sleepily of course, because he seemed to be suffering from a permanent lethargic state—and I felt vaguely disturbed by the sudden sharp glint that appeared in his optics.

We just silently stared at each other over his desk before he walked around it and sat at the edge of the table. My own optics flickered to the dangerously swaying stack of datapads at the other end of the table. He paid it no mind because apparently sleepy medics don't care for precarious datapads that may or may not be unhealthy to his future health.

"I've been thinking about your questions and it's been bothering me how you didn't know the most basic of information in regards to our frames." He drawled as I processed his words. "That you don't even know about defragging and spark memories makes me apprehensive."

I had an 'oh-shit' moment and blurted out the first thing I thought of. "It's the datapad to the helm." I nodded to myself, acting nonchalant. More like I convinced myself I was nonchalant.

He immediately shook his helm. "I'm a medic. I know exactly what a datapad to the helm affects and it is not losing the most basic of information. That information is in the first basic data packs given to sparklings when they upgrade to their next frame." He leans forward near-imperceptibly. "Any Cybertronian would know that. Now tell me the truth and don't lie."

I twitch. "Why do you even care?"

"It's my job to care, I'm a medic." The corner of his mouth drops a bit. "Now talk."

The truth, huh? "You're not going to believe me."

He replies immediately. "I don't care."

Right. "So let's say a _human_ ,an organic species, suddenly wake up in a Cybertronian frame..."

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 **I've been wondering but how do you guys plan a story? Do you make a timeline? An outline? Or do you just wing it like a boss?**


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